Milton Friedman was traveling in a developing Asian nation when his host took him to visit an excavation project that was part of a public works program. Instead of using earth-moving equipment, the workers were using shovels. Friedman asked why. His host told him the aim of the program was to employ as many workers as possible. Friedman quipped: "Why not use spoons instead of shovels?"
As technological developments increased farm yields over the last two centuries, the share of the US population employed in agriculture fell from around 90 percent to around 2 percent. The lay American public supposes that when workers lose their jobs, we become worse off — they suffer from what economist Bryan Caplan calls the 'make-work' bias. But would anyone prefer to live in a society in which many went hungry and no one enjoyed the wealth, financial security, job growth, and innovation created as all those workers lost their farm jobs? Follow Caplan, author of The Myth of the Rational Voter, as he explains the gap between the public's opinion and the economist's facts. In this video, Caplan talks about the merits and demerits of 'making work' - instead of letting individuals find work.► Learn More:-Frederic Bastiat contends that to aim to increase the proportion of effort to output is to imitate Sisyphus in his hopeless attempt to move a stone up a hill: http://mises.org/daily/6157/Industry-...-Daniel J. Mitchell explains the fallacy that government creates jobs: http://www.cato.org/publications/comm...
Slaves – human or robotic – are a form of capital. After the cost of maintenance, the profits from their work go to their owners.Wolf does not mention it, but the robots should say a prayer to central bankers. By reducing interest rates, they also reduce the cost of capital.At zero rate of interest, for example, the real cost of a robot is zero. And if that robot can replace an average, marginally competent employee with a bad attitude, the employer makes a profit of $42,000 (or whatever he would have paid the human)… not counting health insurance and the parking place.The lower the cost of capital, the more robots take their place in the labor force… and the more labor costs drop.
What misleads the adversaries of machinery and foreign importations is that they judge of them by their immediate and transitory effects, instead of following them out to their general and definite consequences.The immediate effect of the invention and employment of an ingenious machine is to render superfluous, for the attainment of a given result, a certain amount of manual labor. But its action does not stop there. For the very reason that the desired result is obtained with fewer efforts, the product is handed over to the public at a lower price; and the aggregate of savings thus realized by all purchasers enables them to procure other satisfactions; that is to say, to encourage manual labor in general to exactly the extent of the manual labor which has been saved in the special branch of industry which has been recently improved. So that the level of labor has not fallen, while that of enjoyments has risen.Let us render this evident by an example.Suppose there are used annually in this country 10 million hats at 15 shillings each; this makes the sum which goes to the support of this branch of industry £7,500,000 sterling. A machine is invented that allows these hats to be manufactured and sold at 10 shillings. The sum now wanted for the support of this industry is reduced to £5,000,000, provided the demand is not augmented by the change. But the remaining sum of £2,500,000 is not by this change withdrawn from the support of human labor. That sum, economized by the purchasers of hats, will enable them to satisfy other wants, and consequently, to that extent will go to remunerate the aggregate industry of the country. With the five shillings saved, John will purchase a pair of shoes, James a book, Jerome a piece of furniture, etc. Human labor, taken in the aggregate, will continue, then, to be supported and encouraged to the extent of £7,500,000; but this sum will yield the same number of hats, plus all the satisfactions and enjoyments corresponding to £2,500,000 that the employment of the machine has enabled the consumers of hats to save. These additional enjoyments constitute the clear profit that the country will have derived from the invention. This is a free gift, a tribute that human genius will have derived from nature. We do not at all dispute that in the course of the transformation a certain amount of labor will have been displaced; but we cannot allow that it has been destroyed or diminished.The same thing holds of the importation of foreign commodities. Let us revert to our former hypothesis.The country manufactures 10 million hats, of which the cost price was 15 shillings. The foreigner sends similar hats to our market, and furnishes them at 10 shillings each. I maintain that the national labor will not be thereby diminished.For it must produce to the extent of £5,000,000 to enable it to pay for 10 million hats at 10 shillings.And then there remains to each purchaser five shillings saved on each hat, or in all, £2,500,000, which will be spent on other enjoyments — that is to say, which will go to support labor in other departments of industry.Then the aggregate labor of the country will remain what it was, and the additional enjoyments represented by £2,500,000 saved upon hats will form the clear profit accruing from imports under the system of free trade.It is of no use to try to frighten us by a picture of the sufferings that, on this hypothesis, the displacement of labor will entail.For, if the prohibition had never been imposed, the labor would have found its natural place under the ordinary law of exchange, and no displacement would have taken place.If, on the other hand, prohibition has led to an artificial and unproductive employment of labor, it is prohibition, and not liberty, that is to blame for a displacement that is inevitable in the transition from what is detrimental to what is beneficial.
The clashing visions of entrepreneurs, whom in general desires to improve productivity through the marketplace (profit and loss system), and political agents, who looks at immediate needs for the purpose of staying in power, can be best illustrated by the proposed wide scale adaption of robotics in China’s economy.
From technologyreview.com
One of the defining narratives of modern China has been the migration of young workers—often girls in their late teenage years—from the countryside into sprawling cities for jobs in factories. Many found work at Foxconn, which employs nearly one million low-wage workers to hand-assemble electronic gadgets for Apple, Nintendo, Intel, Dell, Nokia, Microsoft, Samsung, and Sony.
So it was a surprise when Terry Guo, the hard-charging, 61-year-old billionaire CEO of Foxconn, said last July that the Taiwan-based manufacturing giant would add up to one million industrial robots to its assembly lines inside of three years.
The aim: to automate assembly of electronic devices just as companies in Japan, South Korea, and the United States previously automated much of the production of automobiles.
Foxconn, one of China's largest private employers, has long played an outsize role in China's labor story. It has used cheap labor to attract multinational clients but now faces international scrutiny over low pay and what some see as inhumane working conditions.
"Automation is the beginning of the end of the factory girl, and that's a good thing," says David Wolf, a Beijing-based strategic communications and IT analyst. Wolf, who has visited many Chinese factory floors, predicts an eventual labor shift similar to "the decline of seamstresses or the secretarial pool in America."
Since the announcement, Guo hasn't offered more details, keeping observers guessing about whether Foxconn's plans are real. (Through its public-relations firm, Burson-Marsteller, Foxconn declined to describe its progress.) Trade groups also haven't seen the huge orders for industrial robots that Foxconn would need, although some experts believe the company may be developing its own robots in house.
"Guo has good reasons for not waving his flag about this too much," says Wolf. Keeping quiet could give Foxconn a jump on competitors. What's more, with the Chinese economy slowing down, "it is politically inadvisable to talk too much about replacing people with robots," he says.
China's leaders see employment as essential to maintaining a harmonious society. The imperative of creating jobs often trumps that of efficiency. For instance, Wang Mengshu, deputy chief engineer at China Railway Tunnel Group, says that labor-saving equipment isn't always used even when it's available. "If all the new tunnels were built with the advanced equipment, that would trim the need for the employment of about six million migrant workers," he says. "In certain fields we don't want to have fast development in China, in order to solve the national employment problem."
Political leaders are shown here as practitioners of neo-Luddism—opposed to many forms of modern technology.
They are either unaware that advances in technology leads to greater productivity and more employment or simply have been looking at their narrow interests.
Hedge fund Andy Kessler eloquently explains the causal relationship in layman’s lingo.
From the Wall Street Journal, (bold emphasis mine)
So how does productivity result in more employment?
Three ways. First, some new technology comes along that allows something never before possible. Cash from an ATM, stock trading from an airplane's aisle seat, ads next to Google search results.
The inventor or entrepreneur who uses the invention benefits from sales and wealth and hires people to produce the good or service. We don't hear about this. Instead we hear about the layoffs of bank tellers, stockbrokers and media salesmen. So productivity becomes the boogeyman for job losses. And many economic cranks would prefer that we just hire back the tellers and toll collectors.
This is a big mistake because new, cheaper technology becomes a platform for others to create or expand businesses that never before made economic sense. Adobe software killed typesetters, but allowed millions cheaply to get into the publishing business. Millions of individuals and micro-size businesses now reach a national, not just local, retail market thanks to eBay. Amazon allows thousands upon thousands of new vendors to thrive and hire.
Consider Uber, a 20-month-old start-up, whose smartphone app knows where you are and with a simple click arranges a private car pickup to take you where you want. It doesn't exist without iPhones or Androids. Taxi and limousine dispatchers lose. Customers win. We'll all be surprised by new tablet applications being dreamed up in garages and basements everywhere.
The third way productivity results in more employment is by attracting capital to satisfy new consumer demands. In a competitive economy, productivity—doing more with less—always lowers the cost of products or services: $5,000 computers become $500 tablets. Consumers get to spend the difference elsewhere in the economy, and entrepreneurs will be happy to sell them what they want or create new things they never heard of, but will want. And those with capital will be eager to fund these entrepreneurs. Win, win.
The mechanism to decide the most effective use for this capital is profits. The stock market bundles profits and is the divining rod of productivity, allocating capital in cycle after cycle toward the economy's most productive companies and best-compensated jobs. And it does so better than any elite economist or politician picking pork-barrel projects and relabeling them as "investments."
The productive use of capital is not an automatic process, of course. It is all about constant experimentation. And it is never permanent: Railroads were once tremendously productive, so were steamships and even Kodachrome. It takes work, year in and year out—update, test, tweak, kill off. Staples is under fire from Amazon and other productive online retailers. Its stock has halved since its 2010 peak and is almost at a 10-year low. So be it.
With all the iPads and Facebook and cloud-computing growth, why is unemployment still 8.2% and job creation stalled? My theory is that productivity is always happening but swims upstream against those that fight it. Unions, regulations and a bizarre tax code that locks in the status quo.
Read more of the fallacies of Luddism from must read classics of the great Frederic Bastiat from “That Which is Seen and That Which is NOT Seen” (Machinery) or from the equally distinguished Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson (The Curse of the Machinery)
I am reminded by the recent conversation I had with the charter president of Rotary of Mandaluyong, Fred Borromeo, who at age 86 ironically is an avid fan of technology.
In his recent encounter with some local government neo-luddites who objected to his suggestion to adapt to new (farming) technology for the same reasons as Chinese politicians, Mr Borromeo told them, “the world will move along with or without you”. Indeed.
The speed of technological advances is just amazing and 3D printing technology seems to be showing the way.
From Discoverynews.com (hat tip Mark Perry; bold emphasis mine)
When surgeons replaced the infected lower jawbone of an 83-year-old woman, they needed a fast replacement tailored to fit the patient's existing bone structure, nerves and muscles. That medical dilemma inspired a world-first achievement -- creating a customized jawbone from scratch with 3D printing technology.
The "printing" process used a laser to heat and melt metal powder in the shape of the jawbone. That process, carried out by Belgian manufacturer LayerWise, allowed the 3D printer to sculpt and build up the patient's medical implant layer by layer. A bioceramic coating ensured that the patient's body would not reject the implant.
"The new treatment method is a world premiere because it concerns the first patient-specific implant in replacement of the entire lower jaw," said Jules Poukens, a surgeon at the University Hasselt in Belgium
Poukens led the team of surgeons that implanted the new jawbone during a four-hour operation at a hospital in Sittard-Geleen in the Netherlands last June, according to the Dutch newspaper De Pers. The elderly patient made a rapid recovery.
"Shortly after waking up from the anesthetics, the patient spoke a few words, and the day after, the patient was able to speak and swallow normally again," Poukens said.
3D printing has already helped many DIY innovators create everything from robots to household items on demand based upon digital designs. But the combination of precise designs and rapid manufacturing could have even greater potential for creating customized body parts for medical patients -- especially when transplanted bone structures and organs suffer from short supply.
The revolutionary 3D printing technology reinforces the secular trend towards decentralization. But this won’t come smoothly as many politically entrenched groups or interests will figure out ways (from environmentalism to health regulations and others) to forestall 3D technology’s fabulous advances.
Also the political battlefield will shift from nations (with no more China or Japan to blame on) to technology. In short expect anti-free market politics to shift from mercantilism to neo-Luddism.
The essence of wealth is the capacity to control the forces of nature, and the extent of wealth depends upon the level of technology and the ability to create new knowledge
We are told that by this Wall Street Journal article that business spending on machines than labor is bad news for the US economy. (bold emphasis added)
The man-vs-machine situation, however, presents a huge negative to the outlook. In an economy based on consumer spending, the lack of jobs and income growth means consumers can’t spend.
Businesses’ preference for equipment — while understandable from a cost perspective — is also a big reason why policymakers are stymied to find ways to ignite job creation.
Indeed, the Federal Reserve‘s pursuit of low interest rates only widens the cost gap. That’s because it cheapens the borrowing costs for capital projects while doing little to hold down payroll expenses.
The reasons cited why businesses spending have been substantially tilted towards machinery have rightly been attributed to political factors:
Aside from the Fed’s policies, again from the same article, (bold added)
You can’t fault companies for investing in new machinery rather than hiring new workers. As two news reports detail, labor costs are rising, a function of both private and public pressures.
First, employers face a jump in health insurance costs. The Kaiser Family Foundation reported a 9% average increase in the premiums paid by employers this year. The average yearly cost to cover a family hit a record $15,073, up sharply from $13,770 in 2010.
Second, companies must deal with higher taxes to replenish state unemployment-benefit coffers. According to Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, employers will get hit by higher tax bills as many states have to pay back Washington for benefit money borrowed during the recession.
So while politics has been a factor, this misses out the more important factor: Investments in machines are about added productivity and a higher standard of living, which eventually brings about more jobs.
The great Henry Hazlitt demolishes this myth in the must read classic Economics in One Lesson p.41-42. Here is an excerpt: [bold emphasis added, italics original]
it is a misconception to think of the function or result of machines as primarily one of creating jobs. The real result of the machine is to increase production, to raise the standard of living, to increase economic welfare. It is no trick to employ everybody, even (or especially) in the most primitive economy. Full employment—very full employment; long, weary, back-breaking employment—is characteristic of precisely the nations that are most retarded industrially. Where full employment already exists, new machines, inventions, and discoveries cannot—until there has been time for an increase in population—bring more employment. They are likely to bring more unemployment (but this time I am speaking of voluntary and not involuntary unemployment) because people can now afford to work fewer hours, while children and the overaged no longer need to work.
What machines do, to repeat, is to bring an increase in production and an increase in the standard of living. They may do this in either of two ways. They do it by making goods cheaper for consumers (as in our illustration of the overcoats), or they do it by increasing wages because they increase the productivity of the workers. In other words, they either increase money wages or, by reducing prices, they increase the goods and services that the same money wages will buy. Sometimes they do both. What actually happens will depend in large part upon the monetary policy pursued in a country. But in any case, machines, inventions, and discoveries increase real wages.
By the article’s main premises—where consumption drives the economy and where machines signify a threat to consumption—then we must conclude that the medieval era or even the stone age would be a much wealthier and ideal society than today.
Cato’s Economist Steve Hanke on the popular political drivel called “energy independence” (bold emphasis mine)
Every president since Richard Nixon has asserted that we are sitting ducks for those who brandish the oil weapon. To keep the evildoers at bay, the government must adopt policies that ensure our energy independence. Like his predecessors, President Obama is worshiping at this altar. And why not? How many elections have been lost by blaming foreigners for an impending crisis?
Despite their cynicism about politicians, most people actually believe that mineral resources, including oil, are doomed to disappear. It’s obvious: Start with a given stock of provisions in the cupboard, subtract consumption and eventually the cupboard will be bare.
But what is obvious is often wrong. We never run out of minerals. At some point it just costs too much to produce them profitably. In the 19th century, the big energy scare was in Europe. Most thought Europe was running out of coal. That doomsday scenario never materialized. Thanks to a plethora of substitutes, the prices that European coal could fetch today are far below its development and extraction costs. Consequently, Europe sits on top of billions of tons of worthless coal.
Once economics enters the picture, the notion of fixed reserves becomes meaningless. Reserves are not fixed. Proven oil reserves, for example, represent a warehouse inventory of the expected cumulative profitable output, not a fixed stock of oil thought to be in the ground.
When thinking about oil reserves, we must also acknowledge another economic reality: Oil is sold in a world market in which every barrel, regardless of its source, competes with every other barrel. Think globally, not locally. When we do, the dwindling reserves dogma becomes nonsense. In 1971, the world’s proven oil reserves were 612 billion barrels. Since then the world has produced approximately 990 billion barrels. We should have run out of reserves fourteen years ago, but we didn’t. In fact, today’s proven reserves are 1,354 billion barrels, or 742 billion barrels more than in 1971.
How could this be? Thanks to improved exploration and development techniques, costs have declined, investments have been made and reserves have been created. The sky is not falling.
Oil is just another economic good whose value is determined by the utility it provides. Thus like all economic goods, oil and energy products are subject to price sensitivity borne out of the forces of demand and supply and technological changes.
In other words, in contrast to naive views of neo-Malthusians, the economic value of oil is never fixed.
Proof of this has been man’s shifting use of energy from firewood to coal to whale oil to kerosene and now to the manifold derivative products of crude oil—gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and etc... That’s why while Peak oil is an engineering reality, Peak oil, as an economic concept, is a myth. Engineering does NOT capture human action.
Despite the recent rise in commodity prices, the real cost prices have been declining over the past 161 years!
Yet the recent price surges have partly been about consumptive demand (mostly imputed to emerging markets) but substantially also due to reservation demand (mostly identified as speculation).
The above graph reveals of the consumptive versus reservation demand from Bank of Japan.
The point is current imbalances of energy has been mainly caused by government interventions from artificial demand (quantitative easing programs, suppressed interest rates) to distortions on the supply side (geographical restrictions, price controls, subsidies, taxes and tariffs and etc).
Thus rising prices isn’t about energy dependency, peak oil and other interventionists babble, but about government failure.
The truth is that there is a cornucopia of commodities in the world as shown by the table from Brookenews. All it takes is for the market to discover and enable them to be commercially useful through price signals.
Yet neo-Malthusians interventionists believe in the fallacy where two wrongs equals a right. They address government intervention failure with even more government intervention, seeing that government is the be-all and end-all of human affairs.
Such political religion can be seen in the widespread celebration of the crass symbolism of the earth hour movement, whose anachronistic proposition is to regress human living standards back to medieval ages. It is more than a practise of atavism, it is an implied belief in misanthrope.
Of course people who fall for the energy independence idiocy simply disdain free trade. Such political blindspots are mainly rooted in the aversion to imports which is read as a mortal sin.
Yet what they preach is hardly what they practise. They don’t ever realize that by restricting the division of labor and comparative advantage, man regresses.
Say you hate fossil fuel? Then just walk or bike. Oh, since bike is also made out of fossil fuel, so just get a horse. But like the asinine shift to candlelight in order to project social conformity to earth hour, primitive means of transportation equates to more environmental hazards.
An example expressed by Gerard Jackson of Brookesnews,
The problem of coal smoke continued into the twentieth century when it was finally solved by the benefits of growth, which had already solved a multitude of other problems such as the tens of thousands of metric tonnes of horse manure that had to be taken from city streets each day (a horse produces about 20 kilos of dung per day), not to mention the 300 grams of liquid a horse releases per mile plus the thousands of dead horses that had to be disposed off each year.
The lengthening time of transport reduces man's productivity and increases the cost of doing things.
Also increasing the use of non-commercial energy via subsidies represent as redistribution of wealth from the consumers (through higher prices or through higher taxes), as well as the transfer of wealth from traditional market appointed suppliers, to the politically endowed industries.
Moreover higher prices and taxes reduces people's purchasing power.
So how does one "prosper" with such backwardness?
As you can see noble ‘romanticized’ intentions by socialists are frequently defeated by reality.
The energy dilemma should be resolved by espousing more trade freedom. Let the markets decide on which energy is more efficient, which energy meets the public’s demand for utility and which energy is the safest (one of the reason perhaps why nuclear energy flourished).
chart from Professor Mark Perry
Intervening politicians only distorts the marketplace and shifts the balance of trade towards political favourites, such as Japan’s nuclear ‘crony’ industry.
The fact is the political economic concept known as autarky, which is the root of the political call for energy independence, translates to the promotion of poverty. This also represents a form of neo-Luddism.
I will be blogging a little lot less over the coming days as two of my children will be having their graduation rites and I will be entertaining my mother who is a resident of Hong Kong and who also came to attend these ceremonies.
Nevertheless here is a quote from Professor Don Boudreaux on the declining influence of Luddism (bold emphasis mine)
This year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Luddism. In the early 19th century, many Brits worried that increasing mechanization of the textile industry posed an unfair disadvantage to flesh-and-blood workers. Many of these technology skeptics, known as "Luddites," destroyed machinery in an effort to protect flesh-and-blood workers from the competition of Technologia's workers.
Luddism, thankfully, is today embraced only by a small group of delirious romantics longing for imaginary pastoral bliss.
Hopefully, protectionism will soon go the way of Luddism, freeing us from the superstition that trade with foreigners is less enriching than is trade with fellow citizens.
As people get to realize and adapt more of what represents as a genuine workable way to prosperity via free trade, protectionism grounded on the fantasies of Luddism will hopefully fade away too.
The transition towards Toffler’s Third Wave or the Hayekian knowledge revolution isn’t just my outlook. It is likewise shared by some, who like me, sees things evolving from the fringes.
Author Andy Kessler predicts that people will play starkly different roles from that of the past, and where technology (and not the Yuan) will eat alot of jobs.
In promoting his latest book Eat People, Andy Kessler writes at the Wall Street Journal, (bold highlights mine, italics his) [my comments]
There are two types of workers in our economy: creators and servers.
Creators are the ones driving productivity—writing code, designing chips, creating drugs, running search engines. Servers, on the other hand, service these creators (and other servers) by building homes, providing food, offering legal advice, and working at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Many servers will be replaced by machines, by computers and by changes in how business operates. It's no coincidence that Google announced it plans to hire 6,000 workers in 2011.
But even the label "servers" is too vague. So I've broken down the service economy further, as a guide to figure out the next set of unproductive jobs that will disappear. (Don't blame me if your job is listed here; technology spares no one, not even writers.)
• Sloppers are those that move things—from one side of a store or factory to another. Amazon is displacing thousands of retail workers. DMV employees and so many other government workers move information from one side of a counter to another without adding any value. Such sloppers are easy to purge with clever code.
• Sponges are those who earned their jobs by passing a test meant to limit supply. According to this newspaper, 23% of U.S. workers now need a state license. The Series 7 exam is required for stock brokers. Cosmetologists, real estate brokers, doctors and lawyers all need government certification. All this does is legally bar others from doing the same job, so existing workers can charge more and sponge off the rest of us.
But eDiscovery is the hottest thing right now in corporate legal departments. The software scans documents and looks for important keywords and phrases, displacing lawyers and paralegals who charge hundreds of dollars per hour to read the often millions of litigation documents. Lawyers, understandably, hate eDiscovery. [Yes, this should diminish the brains for interventionists-Prudentinvestor]
Doctors are under fire as well, from computer imaging that looks inside of us and from Computer Aided Diagnosis, which looks for patterns in X-rays to identify breast cancer and other diseases more cheaply and effectively than radiologists do. Other than barbers, no sponges are safe. [According to Marketingcharts.com ‘8 in 10 Web Users Look for Online Health Data’-Prudentinvestor]
• Supersloppers mark up prices based on some marketing or branding gimmick, not true economic value. That Rolex Oyster Perpetual Submariner Two-Tone Date for $9,200 doesn't tell time as well as the free clock on my iPhone, but supersloppers will convince you to buy it. Markups don't generate wealth, except for those marking up. These products and services provide a huge price umbrella for something better to sell under.
• Slimers are those that work in finance and on Wall Street. They provide the grease that lubricates the gears of the economy. Financial firms provide access to capital, shielding companies from the volatility of the stock and bond and derivative markets. For that, they charge hefty fees. But electronic trading has cut into their profits, and corporations are negotiating lower fees for mergers and financings. Wall Street will always exist, but with many fewer workers.
• Thieves have a government mandate to make good money and a franchise that could disappear with the stroke of a pen. You know many of them: phone companies, cable operators and cellular companies are the obvious ones. But there are more annoying ones—asbestos testing and removal, plus all the regulatory inspectors who don't add value beyond making sure everyone pays them. Technologies like Skype have picked off phone companies by lowering international rates. And consumers are cutting expensive cable TV services in favor of Web-streamed video. [crony capitalism under pressure-prudentinvestor]
Like it or not, we are at the beginning of a decades-long trend. Beyond the demise of toll takers and stock traders, watch enrollment dwindle in law schools and medical schools. Watch the divergence in stock performance between companies that actually create and those that are in transition—just look at Apple, Netflix and Google over the last five years as compared to retailers and media.
Two things:
One, this makes investments in the technology sector very compelling, despite the applied inflationism by global central banks.
Proof of this has been the steady ‘top’ ranking of the technology sector in the distribution of the sectoral weightings in the US S&P 500 over the years. And the technology sector remains a solid outperformer today.
Two, political opposition would likely emanate not only from anti trade/mercantilists but likewise from neo-Luddites.
Frederic Bastiat in his magnificent classic That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen rebutted a similar objection as seen through this: "A curse on machines! Every year, their increasing power devotes millions of workmen to pauperism, by depriving them of work, and therefore of wages and bread. A curse on machines!"
